THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum

by Keel, John A.

  Even more curious, the phantom radio broadcaster somehow manages to fake broadcasts from doomed planes and ships, particularly in that stretch of the Atlantic known as the Bermuda Triangle. These broadcasts are picked up hours—even days—after the ship or plane has gone down. There are dozens of these incidents. For example, when the submarine Scorpion suddenly sank in 1968, naval installations received signals on the very exclusive Very Low Frequency (VLF) channel used by nuclear subs. The signals used the proper—and secret—naval code, and were triangulated (a simple technique for pinpointing the location of the source). Ships and planes were rushed to the empty spot on the ocean that had produced the signals. Months later the wreckage of the Scorpion was found on the ocean bottom hundreds of miles away from that spot. Naval officials vaguely termed the signals “hoaxes.”

  What kind of hoax? Had some enterprising joker loaded a rare and expensive VLF transmitter into a boat together with a copy of the U.S. Navy’s secret codebook, sailed out into the middle of the Atlantic, broadcast his phoney signals, then somehow eluded the massive search fleet that rushed to the scene?

  If you watch your daily newspaper closely the next time (and, sadly, there will be a “next time”) there is a naval disaster in the Atlantic, you will almost certainly find a mention of mysterious radio signals received by the Coast Guard, Navy, or private operators. A day after the Anita, a freighter, sank in March 1973, our phantom broadcaster was sending messages in the Anita’s name.

  The National Bureau of Standards has taken a special interest in these ersatz broadcasts for years. They have gone so far as to mount special ultrasonic microphones along the edge of the Bermuda Triangle. (They picked up freakish whispering sounds.) And they have installed special VLF receivers in the Arctic and Antarctic, On May 7, 1965, Carl Robert Disch, the young scientist manning the VLF receiver in Antarctica, left his post to walk a few yards to a nearby building. He was never seen again. The other scientists based in that bleak, inhospitable spot conducted an extensive search without finding a trace of him. His dog, Gus, took off the following day and also vanished.

  In 1969 NASA launched the “Daddy Longlegs” radio astronomy satellite into an orbit 3,640 miles above the earth. As it passed over the icy waters of the Antarctic, its sophisticated gear intercepted a powerful burst of radio energy below in megahertz in the VLF range. Dr. Robert G. Stone, project scientist for the satellite, said the signals were picked up on three different passes over a spot between Antarctica and New Zealand. Yet on other passes over the same area, there were no signals. They came in quick bursts, seemingly as directional as a laser beam. In other words, the earth is not only being bathed in all manner of radio signals from space, it is also answering some of those signals with, its own natural energies.

  Or is the Atlantis power transmitter located in Antarctica?

  Other satellites have detected peculiar gravitational anomalies off the coast of the Philippine Islands. And funny radio signals have been picked up everywhere from Vietnam to the heart of New York City. It is common for the public-address systems in schools and churches to suddenly go haywire and produce loud voices calling off numbers inanely. Usually the listeners assume that the equipment is picking up the calls of taxi companies. Even sound-movie projectors and tape recorders have intercepted these bizarre signals. Having heard them myself, I can testify that they are not taxi broadcasts. Nor could such equipment pick up taxi broadcasts. The signals have to be in the VLF range to be received by non-receivers (without detectors and rectifiers) like PA systems. But this poses another problem. Voice transmissions are very difficult in the lower VLF range, and Morse code and teletypes are used by government transmitters. (VLF penetrates water and is used to contact our nuclear submarines.)

  Equally peculiar are the weird signals that frequently show up on television sets. Television sound is broadcast on FM (frequency modulation) channels, and it is virtually impossible for a TV set to receive a broadcast from a taxi company or a ham operator. Some people have reported hearing voices from their TV sets directed to them personally! In some cases, strange unearthly images have replaced the program being watched.[23]

  Radio sets that were completely turned off at the time have suddenly boomed with a phantom voice. Perhaps the cones of the loudspeakers were activated by a beam of VLF waves from somewhere nearby. Readers of UFO lore are familiar with hundreds of cases of this sort in the past thirty years.

  Beginning in the 1950s ham radio operators around the world began to have bizarre experiences with these phantom broadcasters. Some hams even went on to become contactees by following instructions received over their sets. At one point the Federal Communications Commission declared it to be illegal to attempt to converse with these “unlicensed transmitters.” A ham could lose his license if he tried to talk with Mars.

  Mysterious telephone calls also play a major role in many UFO and occult incidents. Apparently the phenomenon can selectively interfere with any kind of electrical apparatus on this planet. The minor magnetic fields around telephone lines can be manipulated by VLF waves, and the monotone metallic voices that harass so many percipients probably do not come from some distant telephone (efforts to trace such calls have always failed) but are produced by an intelligently guided beam of electromagnetic energy. Today the countryside is dotted with microwave relay towers that broadcast long distance phone calls from one tower to another. Our hypothetical EM force could simply alter the frequencies of those microwaves to reproduce its own message. There have been an exceptional number of UFO sightings around the relay towers and long-distance radio transmission towers. Instead of seeking a “free lunch” of man-made energy, as some researchers have suggested, the blobs of luminous energy may have been placing calls and cheating the omnipresent AT&T out of tolls.

  Phone calls imitating the voices of deceased persons are becoming more and more common. These are undoubtedly produced by the same phenomenon that passed along amazingly accurate prophecies to me in the 1960s and which even imitated my own voice on several occasions.

  How far does this phenomenon dare go? Was Adolf Hitler actually sleeping peacefully in his bomb shelter while his generals were receiving phone calls from that familiar, hysterical voice screaming, “Burn Paris! Flood the Berlin subways! Kill everybody!”?

  Where does our reality end and the super-reality of the superspectrum begin? The two seem to be so intermixed that separation is impossible, and as we plummet headlong into the Aquarian Age, it is becoming more and more difficult to discern any separation point. In other ages the two space-time continuums overlapped and produced times of magic and religious miracles. Man’s earliest myths seem to be describing a time of mixed realities. Today, with tall hairy monsters stomping about the countryside and glowing spheres hovering in the night skies, we seem to be twirling into a strange new land, perhaps into a Dark Age ruled by the madness of a force without physical form but able to reach us and communicate with us through our own playthings.

  21

  Until the last century most Christians believed that the human race was only about six thousand years old, the period covered by the Bible. Now we know that the earth is at least three billion years old, and remnants of human skulls have been found in Africa and elsewhere dating back at least five million years. Modern man is really not very different physically or mentally from the men who farmed the Indus Valley five thousand years ago. Our cumulative knowledge is greater, of course, and we have skills that would mystify our ancestors, but we are still the same basic animal that sat in the mouth of a cave and watched the dinosaurs stroll by. Does it seem logical that our ancient brethren were content to sit in those caves for millions of years without making any progress in any direction and then, very suddenly—in a mere two thousand years or so—rise from horse-drawn carts to lunar rockets? It is more probable that many great civilizations blossomed and died here in the past five million years. Some of these civilizations need not have been comprised of humans as we now know humans t
o be. They could have been giants (there is considerable evidence that a race of giants once inhabited the earth), or they could have been a life form so alien from us, and so much more intelligent than us, that our direct ancestors hid from them in caves and regarded them as fearsome gods when they flashed overhead in their wonderful flying machines. (Cave paintings of UFO-type objects and strange beings have been found throughout Africa, Asia, France, and Australia. Some have been dated at about forty thousand years.)

  These super earthlings, let’s call them the Titans, could have erected some of the gigantic stone structures that baffle modern archaeologists. But the earth they knew was certainly radically different from the planet we live on today. Great cataclysms and cosmic catastrophes have occurred in the past five million years. The Arctic Circle and Greenland may once have been on the Equator. Fossils and seashells found in the heart of Africa’s Sahara Desert indicate that that barren land was once under water. There is evidence that the frozen continent of Antarctica may once have been a richly vegetated land located where Florida now sits.

  Perhaps the Titans built the Eighth Tower, a kind of electronic time capsule that continues to function purposelessly millions of years later. Perhaps scattered survivors of those earlier civilizations became the gods of modern man, visiting the temples on top of the pyramids to deflower the sacred virgins and produce a new strain. The Bible tells us that the gods sired mighty men who became famous in their own period of history.

  At the beginning of the modern epoch, about five thousand years ago, this planet was divided into twenty or thirty kingdoms. The children of those ladies on those golden beds became kings by “divine right.” First, according to tradition, the gods ruled over us directly, teaching us agriculture and giving us laws. Then they withdrew, visiting us occasionally to bed down with mortal women and pass their powers on to their children. These children, though ever mindful of their godly heritage, were mortal and corrupt and often abusive of their powers. To protect their wealth and property, they indulged in inbreeding, one royal family marrying into another. At first their blood actually ran blue, just like their pères. Hence the term “blueblood” and the fact that even today some royal families suffer from hemophilia (their blood won’t coagulate).

  The twenty or thirty families who ruled the world owned it. They had absolute power, the power of life and death over the people who lived in their kingdom, a power handed down to them from the Age of the Gods. So every person on this planet was a slave, owned by the mysterious gods through their mortal successors.

  As time passed, the real gods disappeared altogether, or their visits became less and less frequent. Rule was transferred to their children, and being at least half-mortal, those little kings were vulnerable to human folly, conspiracies, assassinations, and death on the battlefield. An important part of every future king’s training, even into modern times, was occultism. They were taught secret details about the supernatural forces that ran the world. Their role, they learned, was to obey those forces and acquiesce to the needs of some long-range cosmic plan.

  With the gods gone, a select group of non-royal men mastered the secrets of the superspectrum and even learned to communicate with it. They conjured up entities and had visions of the future. When their prophecies came true, the populaces gathered around them, and they organized religions. In some kingdoms they became more important than the king himself. Religious texts, including the Bible, describe how people consulted the special breastplates worn by the priests. Were those plates some form of radio receiver tuned into the Eighth Tower of the Titans?

  The gods were gone, but their malady lingered on.

  Because few kings had the psychic abilities or magical talents necessary to communicate with the superspectrum, the priests gradually assumed greater importance and usurped much of the royal authority. Somewhere around 3000 BC mankind’s dependence on “magic” led to the First Dark Age, an age now shrouded in the mist of legend, when the gods ruled through magic and witchcraft and the common people lived in an environment of dark terrors. This was the time of dragons and loathsome monsters and demons. The children of the gods were deposed by high priests and sorcerers who established themselves as false gods. It was an age of political intrigue, when true learning was driven underground and histories were rewritten to suit the whimsies of the mad dictators. All that remains of that period are the enigmatic carvings of Babylon and the tangled mythologies of China.

  The First Dark Age ended abruptly with a cataclysm that nearly destroyed the earth and was impressed into the oral memories of all tribes and races as the Great Flood. There were days of total darkness when the light from the sun was mysteriously suppressed, and men suffered such great lethargy they could not stir. This was probably a time when the planet rocked on its axis and may even have altered its orbit, affected, perhaps, by some interloping cosmic body that crashed through our solar system somewhere between the earth and the sun. Correlative legends of this awesome period have survived in many isolated cultures. The Egyptians may have built the Great Pyramid in anticipation of the event and used it to store precious records and artifacts. (Cracked blocks in the pyramid indicate that it suffered one or more very severe earthquakes. Its alignment with true north was also slightly altered.)

  The survivors of the planetary catastrophe were catapulted back to a primitive state, sustained only by dimming memories of the previous age. But the shreds of the old god-king system were retained in a slightly modified form. The Osiris myth gripped the Egyptians, while the people of the Mediterranean eagerly, fearfully worshipped every apparition that appeared, and as the witnesses increased in number, so did the gods. New priesthoods clinging to remnants of old rites and old beliefs sprang up. The same kinds of manifestations that haunt us now were haunting men then. There were funny lights in the sky, usually around the sacred solstice holidays. Gifted men and women entered trances, and the strange voices spilling from their lips predicted future events with unerring accuracy. Honest men were plagued with bizarre coincidences. Golden entities and demons with flaming eyes appeared before solitary travelers on the desert. History was repeating itself. As with every sociopolitical system, ambitious, power-hungry megalomaniacs assumed control and twisted the religious beliefs of the masses to serve their own ends.

  Men had been keeping careful records for thousands of years, and these priceless documents were stored in the great libraries of China and Egypt until they were destroyed by fires. Wars, invasions by barbarians, and assorted natural catastrophes also took a terrible toll on human knowledge. Our real heritage was lost. Our race’s past was obliterated. We entered a long period of abysmal ignorance, and the paranormal entities stepped across the barriers of space and time to visit with human psychics and spell out a fascinating but false history to fill the gap. The prophets, convinced that their encounters were of supreme importance, wrote down—or dictated to scribes—the quaint histories narrated by the entities. These books and scrolls were stored in temples and religious places to be read aloud to gatherings of worshippers on holy days. Some of the documents were even banned from the public and became the property of esoteric priesthoods and religious orders.

  Eventually selections from these “inspired” writings were brought together to form the holy books of the various religions in the East and the West. Although they were widely reproduced by printing with carved wooden blocks in the Orient, the Western religions had to copy the codices tediously by hand. Priests and monks in isolated monasteries made such copying their life’s work. In the process of producing new hand-illuminated versions of the old texts, certain liberties were taken. Archaic phrases were altered, new paragraphs were inserted, priestly editors censored and cleaned up vast sections (the polite “begetting” of the latex versions displaced the graphic sexual descriptions of the originals). Some codices outlined such unbelievable manifestations of the supernatural that they were declared impossible and spurious and were omitted from the later religious texts. Religious
fanatics added their own touches as the manuscripts passed from copyist to copyist, spanning whole generations.

  The madmen who ran the world (and the world has always been run by madmen) suppressed the religious texts and rewrote history to suit their own needs and vanity. When one leader passed away, his successor would rewrite history just as his successor would change the records he left behind. So we had three histories to draw upon: the imaginative and mischievous historical legends spun by the entities; the censored and revised histories compiled by the court historians; and the work of independent historians such as Herodotus, who were greatly influenced by the first two groups and who threw in an extra measure of folklore and legend. In short, Henry Ford was right when he observed, “History is bunk.”

  Man had developed an important body of knowledge in ancient times. He had studied the atom, astronomy, and the superspectrum, and had learned to control some of the mysterious forces of nature. But the scholars possessing this knowledge were driven underground by the religious fanatics and by the evil leaders, who regarded their seeming powers as a personal threat. Corrupt forms of the ancient knowledge were adopted by some priesthoods, however, and subjects like astrology emerged from the corruptions. Even the underground scholars were corrupted, splintering into various forms of occultism, discarding everything except those practices that worked the easiest and for the most people. Witchcraft and black magic developed most rapidly since they were based upon ancient principles for controlling the so-called elementals, the brainless forces that produced fairies, some ghosts, and kindred phenomena.

  The last thousand years before the Christian era began as an odd bag of magical beliefs and practices, pagan religions, and exploitations of the fears and superstitions of the common people by power-mad kings trying to hold together theft little kingdoms. Then, in a single century, order was introduced into the chaos. Around 500 B.C. Siddhartha Gautama fell asleep under a tree in India, and when he awoke he was filled with a great new philosophy. He denounced his worldly goods and began to preach the existence of a single supermind—a cosmic consciousness— rather than building fantasies about legions of gods and angels in a mythical heaven. He became the Buddha.